free variable

I enjoyed this comment by Marc Hamann in a discussion of MIT’s switch away from SICP for undergraduate computer science education; the whole comment is thought-provoking, but this excerpt is especially delightful:

Somewhat more facetiously, I have to suggest that maybe they are just being merciful to their students, since it seems that many people, seduced by the excitement of SICP, go on to suffer miserably in their career as API and framework plumbers, wishing that being a programmer was actually the elegant and rational process that Abelson and Sussman had made it out to be.

SICP, if read carefully and properly, presents almost an entire undergraduate computer science curriculum in a semester. It’s a shame that MIT EECS students won’t be drinking from that firehose any more. Furthermore, I have long believed that Scheme is unbeatable as a language for teaching computer scientists rather than programmers. (Although “unbeatable” implies a partial ordering: I’d guess it’s possible to argue that Haskell or an ML-family language is equally suitable.)